Category Archives: Cloning

New Delhi, Aug 17 (PTI) A 37-year-old Ghana national was arrested for allegedly cloning debit cards and fraudulently withdrawing money from ATMs, the police said today.

The accused, Kingsley Boafo, was arrested on August 12 near HDFC Bank ATM, located on Main Najafgarh Road in Uttam Nagar. He has been staying in the country even after his visa had expired, said Deputy Commissioner of Police (Southwest) Surender Kumar.

He had come to Mumbai from Ghana in July 2015 in connection with his garment business. In October that year, he shifted to Delhi and continued the business of exporting ready-made clothes to his country, the police said.

With a desire to earn more in a short period of time, he used to browse the Internet and found ways to clone ATM cards. He bought devices online to clone ATM cards, the police said.

Boafo surveyed the ATMs that did not have security guards and through a skimmer placed in the card reader slot of the machines he would copy details of cards inserted in the slot, the police said, adding the data was downloaded to a laptop and then transferred to a Magnetic Strip Reader/Writer (MSR).

Blank debit cards were swiped through the MSR and these cloned cards were used to withdraw money from the ATMs fraudulently, they said.

Boafo was helped by one Issac, an African, in preparing cloned ATM cards. The duo deleted the stolen data from their devices soon after withdrawing money as the ATM cards, whose data they fraudulently obtained, were blocked by card holders, the police said.

The accused was in Mumbai for a couple of months this year and had returned to Delhi in the last week of July. It is suspected that he committed similar offences in Mumbai also, they said, adding police are on the lookout for Issac. PTI SLB NSD

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Ghana national held for withdrawing money by cloning ATM cards - India Today

August 16, 2017 by Lisa Zyga feature Schematic of the experimental setup, in which complementary properties x and y are jointly measured. Credit: Thekkadath et al. 2017 American Physical Society

(Phys.org)In quantum mechanics, it's impossible to precisely and simultaneously measure the complementary properties (such as the position and momentum) of a quantum state. Now in a new study, physicists have cloned quantum states and demonstrated that, because the clones are entangled, it's possible to precisely and simultaneously measure the complementary properties of the clones. These measurements, in turn, reveal the state of the input quantum system.

The ability to determine the complementary properties of quantum states in this way not only has implications for understanding fundamental quantum physics, but also has potential applications for quantum computing, quantum cryptography, and other technologies.

The physicists, Guillame S. Thekkadath and coauthors at the University of Ottawa, Ontario, have published a paper on determining complementary properties of quantum clones in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.

As the physicists explain, in the classical world it's possible to simultaneously measure a system's complementary states with exact precision, and doing so reveals the system's state. But as Heisenberg theoretically proposed in 1927 when he was beginning to develop his famous uncertainty principle, any measurement made on a quantum system induces a disturbance on that system.

This disturbance is largest when measuring complementary properties. For instance, measuring the position of a particle will disturb its momentum, changing its quantum state. These joint measurements have intrigued physicists ever since the time of Heisenberg.

As a way around the difficulty of performing joint measurements, physicists have recently investigated the possibility of making a copy of a quantum system, and then independently measuring one property on each copy of the system. Since the measurements are performed separately, they would not be expected to disturb each other, yet they would still reveal information about the original quantum system because the copies share the same properties as the original.

This strategy immediately encounters another quantum restriction: due to the no-cloning theorem, it's impossible to make a perfect copy of a quantum state. So instead, the physicists in the new study investigated the closest quantum analog to copying, which is optimal cloning. The parts of the clones' states that share the exact same properties as those of the input state are called "twins."

Whereas theoretical perfect copies of a quantum state are uncorrelated, the twins are entangled. The physicists showed that, as a consequence of this entanglement, independently measuring the complementary properties on each twin is equivalent to simultaneously measuring the complementary properties of the input state. This leads to the main result of the new study: that simultaneously measuring the complementary properties of twins gives the state (technically, the wave function) of the original quantum system.

"In quantum mechanics, measurements disturb the state of the system being measured," Thekkadath told Phys.org. "This is a hurdle physicists face when trying to characterize quantum systems such as single photons. In the past, physicists successfully used very gentle measurements (known as weak measurements) to circumvent this disturbance.

"As such, our work is not the first to determine complementary properties of a quantum system. However, we've shown that a different strategy can be used. It is based on a rather nave idea. Suppose we want to measure the position and momentum of a particle. Knowing that these measurements will disturb the particle's state, can we first copy the particle, and measure position on one copy and momentum on the other? This was our initial motivation. But it turns out that copying alone is not enough. The measured copies must also be entangled for this strategy to work.

"This is what we showed experimentally. Instead of determining the position and momentum of a particle, we determined complementary polarization properties of single photons. You would intuitively expect this strategy to fail due to the no-cloning theorem. However, we showed that is not the case, and this is the greatest significance of our result: measuring complementary properties of the twins directly reveals the quantum state of the copied system."

As the physicists explain, one of the most important aspects of the demonstration is working around the limitations of the no-cloning theorem.

"In our daily lives, information is often copied, such as when we photocopy a document, or when DNA is replicated in our bodies," Thekkadath explained. "However, at a quantum level, information cannot be copied without introducing some noise or imperfections. We know this because of a mathematical result known as the no-cloning theorem. This has not stopped physicists from trying. They developed strategies, known as optimal cloning, that minimize the amount of noise introduced by the copying process. In our work, we go one step further. We showed that it is possible to eliminate this noise from our measurements on the copies using a clever trick that was theoretically proposed by Holger Hofmann in 2012. Our results do not violate the no-cloning theorem since we never physically produce perfect copies: we only replicate the measurement results one would get with perfect copies."

In their experiments, the physicists demonstrated the new method using photonic twins, but they expect that the ability to make precise, simultaneous measurements of complementary properties on twins can also be implemented with quantum computers. This could lead to many practical applications, such as providing an efficient method to directly measure high-dimensional quantum states, which are used in quantum computing and quantum cryptography.

"Determining the state of a system is an important task in physics," Thekkadath said. "Once a state is determined, everything about that system is known. This knowledge can then be used to, for example, predict measurement outcomes and verify that an experiment is working as intended. This verification is especially important when complicated states are produced, such as the ones needed in quantum computers or quantum cryptography.

"Typically, quantum states are determined tomographically, much like how the brain is imaged in a CAT scan. This approach has the limitation that the state is always globally reconstructed. In contrast, our method determines the value of quantum states at any desired point, providing a more efficient and direct method than conventional methods for state determination.

"We experimentally demonstrated our method using single photons. But, our strategy is also applicable in a variety of other systems. For instance, it can be implemented in a quantum computer by using only a single quantum logic gate. We anticipate that our method could be used to efficiently characterize complicated quantum states inside a quantum computer."

Explore further: Blind quantum computing for everyone

More information: G. S. Thekkadath, R. Y. Saaltink, L. Giner, and J. S. Lundeen. "Determining Complementary Properties with Quantum Clones." Physical Review Letters. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.050405, Also at arXiv:1701.04095 [quant-ph]

2017 Phys.org

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(Phys.org)In quantum mechanics, it's impossible to precisely and simultaneously measure the complementary properties (such as the position and momentum) of a quantum state. Now in a new study, physicists have cloned quantum ...

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-So semantics is determining the limits of knowledge now? This is akin to the silly notion that sentience is needed to collapse the waveform.

"Once a state is determined, everything about that system is known."

-So everything CAN be known about something, which says that there are no limits to what we can know, which says that kant was indeed farting in the wind.

Too bad noumenon passed on before he was able to experience this greatest of disappointments.

Does this buy us any thing as far as entropic uncertainty relations? Nounmenon is sort of dead, but just because we can isolate transactable phenomenalism of sensory somatic integration, its projection still lags the immersiveness of the now. It depends on how you define "Itself." You cannot undermine the illusion of vantage, or non-hermitian difference for any measure. You do not state another's dependence. Yet as soon as we interact, we can talk about the correlates of one another's time dependence, no matter how obvious. We can steer experiments close to trivial initial conditions, but we have yet to expand them all for equivalence. Interpretation open. It remains existential, with near misses. Thekkadath, is being misquoted here. Entanglement is the most that can be known. We cannot measure states, but we can choose to agree, for all intensive purposes, determinable difference for a given effective theory. If it all shared in/distinguishables, what would we have to talk about?

There are fancier ways of sending barely detectable light, specific to location, that don't require encryption, but could theoretically be unfolded, if you knew exactly when to expect them and where they were going.

-Yeah youre the guy who likes to post while stoned out of his gourd arent you? Prose poems are not rational discourse FYI-

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Physicists measure complementary properties using quantum clones - Phys.Org

NEW DELHI: A Nigerian man has been arrested for cloning debit cards of over 100 people and withdrawing money fraudulently from their accounts. The victims had swiped their cards at ATMs in upscale south Delhi colonies.

The man identified as Kingsley had a unique modus operandi. Police said he would identify an ATM kiosk that didn't have a security guard around. He would go inside, rip open the card swiping slot of the machine and place a scanner behind it. Black tape would hold the device in place. Next, Kingsley would place a camera somewhere on the machine so that its focus would be on the keypad.

Whenever an ATM user swiped his card, the scanner would capture the details while the camera would record the PIN as the customer keyed it in. Once the customer stepped out, Kingsley would go inside, fetch the card reader and camera, and clone the card with the details. Then he would swipe the cloned card at other ATMs and withdraw money. In this way, customer after customer fell victim to Kingsley's fraud.

Until one day, a woman who operated an ATM near Hari Nagar found a large transaction done from her card long after she had withdrawn money. She immediately reported the matter to the police, who then obtained footage of CCTV cameras installed nearby.

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Nigerian held for duping Delhiites by cloning cards at ATMs | Delhi ... - Times of India

Hwang Woo-suk, a South Korean stem cell scientist who caused a major stir in the scientific community for academic fraud in 2005, has recently lost a legal battle over the rights to a technique critical to re-creating the woolly mammoth.

According to local reports Tuesday, Hwang had filed a criminal complaint against Park Se-pil of Jeju National University and his research colleagues, accusing them of embezzlement and attempted blackmail.

However, the Seoul Eastern District Prosecutors Office said it did not find sufficient evidence of the claims against Park and his team, closing the case that had been open for years.

The plan was to replicate the mammoth cells in a lab. From the copied cells, researchers would extract the nucleus, which contains the animals genetic information. The nucleus would then be inserted into the eggs of female elephants, the closest living relatives to the now-extinct animal.

Hwangs mammoth cloning project had garnered international attention at the time, even prompting National Geographic to air a detailed documentary on the Korean scientist and his work in 2013.

However, Hwang and his Russian research partners ran into technological hurdles even before the cloning process could begin. For years, the team continuously failed to artificially cultivate the mammoth cells in the lab.

In 2015, Hwang recruited the help of Park and his team, who claimed they were able to successfully cultivate the mammoth cells needed for the nucleus transplant, based on the samples provided by Hwang.

Hwang and Park ended up clashing over the ownership of the cell cultivation technology. Hwang argued that Parks work constitutes a part of his own research and that he thus possesses the sole rights related to all the related experimental methods.

Meanwhile, Park claimed Hwang provided the mammoth cells without prior conditions and the research should be considered a collaborative effort, as his teams cell cultivation method plays a critical role.

According to records, Park refused to hand over his work to Hwang without signing proper terms of agreement, stating that he would rather dispose of the cultivated mammoth cells than freely pass them on to Hwang.

Hwang then sued Park and his team on embezzlement and attempted blackmail. However, the prosecution decided not to pursue the charges of the alleged offenses earlier this month.

The recent investigation has also prompted new allegations that Hwang illegally imported the mammoth samples into Korea without duly reporting to local authorities. Hwang has denied such allegations to the prosecution, according to local reports.

Hwang Woo-suk, 64, is a former professor at the College of Veterinary Medicine at Seoul National University. He was placed at the center of one of the worlds biggest scientific scandals in 2005 for fabricating evidence he had successfully cloned human embryos and yielded stem cell lines from them.

Recently, the disgraced scientist rose to the domestic spotlight for being a close collaborator to Sunchon National University professor Park Ki-young, who was recently appointed as the new chief of the Science, Technology and Innovation Office at Koreas Ministry of Science and ICT.

However, Park, who had been a co-author of Hwangs fraudulent research paper in 2005, resigned from her post last week after the local science community and politicians fiercely opposed her appointment, citing ethical lapses.

By Sohn Ji-young (jys@heraldcorp.com)

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Disgraced Korean scientist Hwang Woo-suk loses legal battle over mammoth cloning tech - The Korea Herald

INDIANAPOLIS (WTHR) - Many schools and companies across the country use a key card entry system to give employees access to work buildings. We have them here at WTHR. It's a pretty common security strategy.

However, one local security expert said a $30 tool can put a company's security at risk. A few inches and a couple seconds, and your identity can be stolen--at least your key card identity.

Armando Perez, the President and General Manager of Hoosier Security says key cards are still the most common way companies allow entry for their employees. Key cards are supposed to be secure, but retailers overseas are threatening that security with a fairly cheap device.

Selling for about $30 online, card copiers are designed to steal your information. Schools can be especially susceptible.

"These copying devices are so inexpensive now, students can get their hands on them, and there could be all kinds of repercussions there," said Perez. "I don't really want to go into giving anybody any ideas about it, but the people who need to solve the problem are aware of this."

Perez said there's really no regulatory method for stopping the production of these card copiers overseas. He said it's up to companies to upgrade their key cards or scanning equipment, which can be costly.

Since you need to be six inches away from someone to copy their entry card, Perez said it likely won't be a stranger on the street, but could very well be an unsuspecting co-worker. That's why it's hard to catch the copier.

"If somebody from research gets the credentials of someone in accounting, they can now have access to all of the accounting information in the business. Nobody would ever know because it's still a valid credential."

As I test, I let him try to clone my entry card to WTHR.

Fortunately, the device wasn't able to clone my card due to the high frequency it emits. But Perez said other schools and companies may be running lower frequencies. Additionally, he warned better, more expensive copiers may still clone my card.

A carbon fiber wallet, which is built to block the frequency signal, can help, but doesn't make it completely preventable. They come at a hefty price - $150 - and a lot of people don't keep key cards in their wallet.

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'Card cloning' device puts key card entry at risk - WTHR

Updated August 15, 2017 16:45:25

Police are urging people to use the 'tap and go' chip on their bank cards in order to protect themselves from fraud through "ghost" terminals.

Detectives from the NSW fraud squad are investigating a series of fraudulent ATM withdrawals across Sydney's south-west using "cloned" credit and debit cards.

Cloned cards are made by swiping the magnetic strip data and PIN from legitimate cards and then transferring the information to a plastic card with a magnetic strip, often a cheap store loyalty card.

"For a cloned card to be used in an ATM they need to have two pieces of information," Acting Superintendent Matt Craft said.

"They need to have the information on the magnetic strip and your PIN if they don't have your PIN they can't make the transaction.

"So it's about reducing the opportunity for criminal syndicates to get access to your PIN by covering it and making sure people can't see you enter your PIN."

Superintendent Craft said criminal syndicates obtained data from card's magnetic strips using a skimming device attached to an ATM or EFTPOS terminal, or they used so-called "ghost" terminals.

He said magnetic strips were "old technology" and customers should rely on their card's secure chip instead.

"It is very difficult for individuals when they're conducting transactions to identify a device that's been placed on an ATM that shouldn't be there or indeed a ghost terminal," he said.

"Often ghost terminals, which are used to capture your data, look very much like the original device.

"You need to be very cautious about using those devices and wherever you can, you should use the chip and tap that's the most secure way."

The prevalence of card cloning in Australia is much lower than overseas, Superintendent Craft said, but it has risen 13 per cent in the past year.

EFTPOS terminals in taxis, restaurants and small businesses, or skimming devices placed on ATMs, were the most common culprits for card skimming and cloning.

The fraud squad has released CCTV footage of a man who is believed to have used a cloned card to steal several hundred dollars in cash.

The man stole the money from several ATMs at Peakhurst and Roselands in Sydney's southwest on June 19.

He is described as Caucasian, aged in his 30s or 40s with short brown hair and a full beard.

He can be seen wearing a black T-shirt with a yellow and white print on the back, black jeans and white sneakers.

He was also wearing a wrist brace or bandage on his right hand.

Topics: police, consumer-protection, fraud-and-corporate-crime, nsw

First posted August 15, 2017 16:42:55

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Using 'tap and go' will protect against fraud through 'ghost' EFTPOS terminals, police say - ABC Online

Recent headlines have heralded the arrival of gene-edited piglets free of viruses that could stand in the way of safe transplantation of porcine organs into humans. The fact is that such attempts at xenotransplantation are nothing new, and more significantly, that the researchers success is questionable, for both technical and ethical reasons.

Drawings of human-animal hybrids, or chimeras, date back to prehistoric times who can forget the bird-headed man in the French Lascaux cave or the ancient Egyptian deities with human heads on animal bodies such as the Great Sphinx?

Great Sphinx (IAN BARKER)

According to the NIHs A Brief History of Clinical Xenotransplantation, the first attempts to intermingle humans and other species actually began back in the 16th century with xenotransfusions, blood transfusions from animals to humans. By the 19th century, doctors were attempting interspecies skin transplantations using both furless creatures such as frogs who were sometimes skinned alive during the process as well as furry creatures such as sheep, rabbits, dogs, cats, rats, chickens, and pigeons. The first pig-to-human corneal transplant was attempted in 1838. None of these early efforts were believed to be very successful, and it would not have occurred to many at the time that these experiments gave no consideration whatsoever to the suffering of the animals involved. (Heres an even more thorough history of xenotransplantation if youre interested.)

Theres a chronic shortage of human organs available for transplants. Dr. David Klassen, chief medical officer at the United Network for Organ Sharing, tells New York Times that last years 33,600 organ transplants in the U.S. left 116,800 patients still on waiting lists. 22 Americans waiting for organs die each day according to Science. Hence the continued keen interested in xenotransplantation.

Some suggest, however, that with a better, simpler and more ethical solution already available, this may actually reflect the eagerness of scientists to do science more than it does a genuine desire for an answer to a problem. As bioethicist L. Syd M Johnson tells Big Think, The shortage of transplantable organs is a very real problem. Other countries have had great success increasing donations by doing simple things like making everyone a donor, unless they explicitly opt-out. Social engineering is a low-tech solution to the organ shortage, and much safer, easier, and cheaper than the high tech genetic engineering being done to possibly make xenotransplantation possible.

(ELI KRISTMAN)

One of the major stumbling blocks in the transplantation of pig organs which may in other ways be human-compatible are PERVs, an (unfortunate) acronym for porcine endogenous retroviruses. PERVs are gamma retroviruses, genetic remnants of ancient viral infections, and theyre woven into the pig genome. There are multiple types of PERV, but its know that PERV-A and PERV-B, at least, can transfer zoonotic microorganisms infections into human cells that have been combined, in vitro, with pig cells.

The team behind the new research, led by geneticist George Church of Harvard and affiliated with the Broad Institute, one of the patent holders of CRISPR-Cas9 and colleague Luhan Yang, had demonstrated in 2015 that they could inactivate PERVs at all of their 62 sites in the pig genome in an immortalized cell line, and thus prevent those cells from passing them to human cells.

Background: pig chromosomes, foreground: Cas9 (WYSS INSTITUTE)

Now theyve gone the next step, using CRISPR-Cas9 to modify the pig genome and clone actual PERV-inactivated piglets. Church claims the first pig-to-human xenotransplant can happen within two years. Some observers consider this prediction wishful thinking.

First off, its impossible to know if inactivating PERVs is all that needs to be done to make porcine organs safe for humans. Scientists already know that pig genes will need to be modified so they dont provoke rejection in humans, and theyll also have to insert other genes to avoid toxic blood interactions. And then there are the things we dont yet know about.

For one thing, its not entirely clear that PERVs are even really the issue. Cardiac transplant surgeon Muhammad Mohiuddin, whos working with United therapeutics to develop implantable porcine hearts tells Science, At this moment, I dont think we are very worried about PERV. Transplant immunologistDavid Cooper says, If this is required, it will add to the time before pigs can be used for transplants in patients in desperate need. And it will add to the cost of providing pigs for the initial clinical trials.

And then there are the considerable ethical issues, on both the human and animal sides.

Johnson reminds us, In past experiments with xenotransplantation, the human recipients of animal organs have all died, some from hyperacute rejection, which results in rapid death, and many others more slowly. People waiting for lifesaving organs are vulnerable and desperate exactly the kinds of people we should be concerned about using as subjects in exceptionally risky experiments.

Another issue to consider is financial. What were talking about here is growing human-compatible organs in genetically modified pigs. Those organs are not going to be free says Johnson. There will be patents. The organs will be commercially grown in for-profit businesses. There are already economic issues related to access to organ transplantation. What happens to patients who cant pay the price? What effect might commercially grown organs have on organ donation? Will potential organ donors be dis-incentivized to donate?

As far as the animals go, the same long-term concerns hold true. The study itself is also a textbook case of what this research is like for the animals involved. The piglets were carried by 17 sows, into each of whom were implanted200-300 cloned embryos. There were initially 37 PERV-inactive piglets, of which 15 piglets remain alive, and the oldest healthy animals are 4-month old. First off, this means 22 piglets died, with only 15 surviving, a less-than-half success rate for the few embryos that resulted in pregnancy. Of the 15 survivors, 4 of the healthiest are said to be 4 months old, but what about the other 11? What condition are they in?

Johnson points out, Cloning is an expensive and inefficient method of reproduction, with a high failure rate, and its very costly in terms of animal welfare. Before we get to the point where we can use pigs as living organ farms, many, many animals will be sacrificed not just pigs, but also the animals first used to test the transplants. Traditionally, the initial experimental organ recipients have been nonhuman primates.

Are pigs sentient?This one jumped off a truck en route to a slaughterhouse. (ZO JOHNSON-BERMAN)

When one balances how little effort has been expended encouraging organ donation and how much money, effort, and likely animal suffering has been invested in scientific research, the Church teams announcement of their PERV-inactive piglets seems like considerably less than the joyous news its often breathlessly characterized as being. And when one then considers just how much remains unknown about the dangers of xenotransplantation, the new study is perhaps as much a warning as it is a game-changing breakthrough.

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CRISPR-Cleaned Piglets Have Been Cloned for Organ Donation - Big Think

(CNN) -- Here's some background information aboutcloning, a process of creating an identical copy of an original.

Facts: Reproductive Cloning is the process of making a full living copy of an organism. Reproductive cloning of animals transplants nuclei from body cells into eggs that have had their nucleus removed. That egg is then stimulated to divide using an electrical charge and is implanted into the uterus of a female.

Therapeutic Cloningis the process where nuclear transplantation of a patient's own cells makes an oocyte from which immune-compatible cells (especiallystem cells) can be derived for transplant. These cells are stimulated to divide and are grown in a Petri dish rather than in the uterus.

Timeline: 1952 - Scientists demonstrate they can remove the nucleus from a frog's egg, replace it with the nucleus of an embryonic frog cell, and get the egg to develop into a tadpole.

1975 -Scientists get tadpoles after transferring cell nuclei from adult frogs.

1986 -Sheep cloned by nuclear transfer from embryonic cells.

February 22, 1997 -Scientists reveal Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be cloned from cells of an adult animal. She was actually born on July 5, 1996.

1998 -More than 50 mice are reported cloned from a single mouse over several generations. Eight calves are cloned from a cow.

2000 -Pigs and goats are reported cloned from adult cells.

2001 -Advanced Cell Technology of Worcester, Massachusetts, says it produced a six-cell cloned human embryo, in research aimed at harvesting stem cells.

2001 -Five bulls are cloned from a champion bull, Full Flush.

2002 -Rabbits and a kitten are reported cloned from adult cells.

December 27, 2002 - Clonaid claims to produce first human clone, a baby girl, Eve.

January 23, 2003 -Clonaid claims to have cloned the first baby boy. The baby was allegedly cloned from tissue taken from the Japanese couple's comatose 2-year-old boy, who was killed in an accident in 2001. Clonaid has never provided physical evidence of the cloning.

February 14, 2003 -The Roslin Institute confirms that Dolly, the world's first cloned mammal, was euthanized after being diagnosed with progressive lung disease. She was 6 years old.

May 4, 2003 -The first mule is cloned at the University of Idaho, named Idaho Gem.

June 9, 2003 -Researchers Gordon Woods and Dirk Vanderwall from the University of Idaho and Ken White from Utah State University claim to have cloned a second mule.

August 6, 2003 -Italian scientists at the Laboratory of Reproductive Technology in Cremona, Italy, say they have created the world's first cloned horse, Prometea, from an adult cell taken from the horse who gave birth to her.

September 25, 2003 -French scientists at the National Institute of Agricultural Research at Joy en Josas, France, become the first to clone rats.

February 12, 2004 -South Korean researchers report they have created human embryos through cloning and extracted embryonic stem cells. Findings by a team of researchers were presented to South Korean scientists and describe in detail the process of how to create human embryos by cloning. The report says the scientists used eggs donated by Korean women. An investigative panel concludes in 2006 that South Korean scientist Woo Suk Hwang's human stem cell cloning research was faked.

August 3, 2005 -South Korean researchers announce they have successfully cloned a dog, an Afghan hound named Snuppy.

December 8, 2008-April 4, 2009 -Five cloned puppies from Trakr, a German Shepherd Sept.11 Ground Zero rescue dog, are born.

May 2009 -Clone of Tailor Fit, a two-time quarter horse world champion, is born, one of several cloned horses born that year.

September 29, 2011 -At South Korea's Incheon Airport, seven "super clone" sniffer-dogs are dispatched to detect contraband luggage. They are all golden Labrador Retrievers that are genetically identical to "Chase," who was the top drug detention canine until he retired in 2007.

May 15, 2013 -Oregon Health & Science University researchers report in the journal Cell that they have created embryonic stem cells through cloning. Shoukhrat Mitalipov and the biologistsproduced human embryos using skin cells, and then used the embryos to produce stem cell lines.

April 2014 -For the first time,cloning technologies have been used to generate stem cells that are genetically matched to adult patients.Researchers put the nucleus of an adult skin cell inside an egg, and that reconstructed egg went through the initial stages of embryonic development, according to research published this month.

The-CNN-Wire & 2017 Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company. All rights reserved.

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Fast facts about cloning - WPSD Local 6: Your news, weather, and sports authority - WPSD Local 6

Beijing biotech lab Sinogene say they have successfully cloned a genetically-modified dog for medical research, and now plan to use the same technology to create "superdogs" for Chinese police.

The beagle puppy named Longlong, born in May, is a clone of a gene-edited beagle called Apple.

These two dogs are 99.9 per cent the same. We've observed their personality and appearance, even their facial expressions are identical. As you can see they're both very naughty and active. Even the way they walk, how they move around, says Mi Jidong, Sinogene General Manager.

Two other clone puppies Nuonuo and Qiqi followed Longlong in June. All were born from surrogate mothers in the lab.

Apple, the original beagle, was genetically modified last year using a gene-editing tool known as CRISPR/Cas9.

Clone puppies Nuonuo and Qiqi were born in May.

Its been more than 20 years since the first mammal, a sheep named Dolly, was cloned in 1996. Since then other animals, including horses and pigs, have since been cloned. The first dog, however, was only duplicated in 2005.

Dogs are extremely difficult to work with. Some cells are very complex and difficult to clone. Also its extremely hard for a dog embryo to survive in lab conditions, its very vulnerable, explains Mr Mi.

Another reason the cloning of dogs may be more difficult is that the animal is more genetically similar to humans than other animals. Approximately 400 out of 900 genetic illnesses in dogs are similar to human diseases.

Its for this reason that Apple, Longlong and his fellow-clones will be used primarily for medical research.

It's the first step in our future development to delve further into modifying dogs for medical research, says Mr Mi.

Apple was gene-edited to have several times higher levels of blood lipid a trait associated with high cholesterol. Sinogene say theyre cooperating with other labs in China to study gene-based diseases including heart disease and diabetes and develop medicines.

Scientist Mi Jidong plays with Sinogene's cloned puppies from a gene-edited beagle.

But thats not the only focus of the lab. Sinogene will also be using the same gene-editing and cloning technique to create super dogs for the police force as early as next year.

Were also exploring how we can use genetic modification and cloning to improve the specific qualities of different working dogs. For example to improve their stamina, their intelligence to make it easier to train them And also give them a better sense of smell, says Mr Mi.

China currently imports many of its police, search and rescue dogs. Mr Mi believes Sinogenes work could save money and improve the quality of Chinas police dog pack.

But the work has been condemned as cruel by animal welfare groups operating in China.

Cloning has many problems. Large numbers of animals are used as donors and surrogates. But the success rate is very small. So its a huge waste of animal life, says Peter Li, China Policy specialist at Humane Society International, and Associate Professor of East Asian Politics at the University of Houston-Downtown.

He says money would be better spent caring for Chinas millions of unwanted dogs.

I think this super dog work is suspect. Dogs are already very intelligent. We know that cloned dogs have health issues, they dont live long. It is a huge waste of public resources to clone dogs for the police force, says Professor Li.

Beijing-based animal rights activist Mary Peng believes medical testing on animals needs to be better regulated

Animal welfare activist and founder of Chinas first international animal hospital in Beijing, Mary Peng, says she doesnt feel animal medical testing should stop but says labs need to be better regulated. Cloning is really just another form of breeding, says Ms Peng. But I share concerns of how the animals are treated.

She says though China has progressed rapidly in recent years when it comes to the treatment and general attitude towards animals, protective laws lag behind international standards.

China is having the worlds biggest love affair with their pets in the history of the world, she says, but this is all very new, less than 25 years old maybe.

And this experimentation, medical research etc, are also really new industries for China, Ms Peng says. And Im not sure that the laws and regulations about how the animals are treated while theyre in these labs have been fully developed.

But Professor Li says the labs work also raises larger ethical questions. If we see cloned animals as a testing object, I wonder how soon this work will be applied to humans. If we have this level of audacity, this level of recklessness as a standard, then many other test labs will do things that should be stopped.

Sinogene scientist works with dog cells in their Beijing lab

Retired Tsinghua University artificial intelligence and ethics expert Professor Zhao Nanyuan dismisses the criticism of animal rights groups as foreign and irrelevant, saying Chinas scientific progress outweighs the cost.

To see human-animal relations as an ethical question is a concept borrowed from Western religion. In Chinese ethics we dont have this.

He says many in China, like him, will focus on the long-term benefit, rather than the individual treatment of an animal or embryo.

In China we have less problems developing genetically modified technology. Im pretty sure other countries will be behind China when it comes to human genetic research because of their concerns."

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China's cloning of genetically modified dogs for research raises concerns - SBS

Orphan Black, the Canadian science fiction show that revolves around human cloning, will end on Saturday, August 12th after five darkly funny, gory seasons. The show began with a former British street urchin, Sarah Manning (Tatiana Maslany), watching as someone with her exact facial features commits suicide by jumping in front of a train. From there, the show unravels to be about large biotech corporations, conspiracies, and above all, morally questionable science.

Spoilers ahead for all of Orphan Black except the finale.

Science classes teach students early on that human experimentation is ethically wrong if the subjects dont know theyre being experimented on, or exactly what the experiment entails. Orphan Black explores this taboo by giving us villains that love experimenting on unwilling or unwitting people. From installing a secret camera in a womans artificial eye to harvesting the eggs of an eight-year-old girl, the corporate forces on the show are unapologetically sinister and indifferent to basic scientific ethics. The show is both a celebration of science and a reminder that its frightening when used to the wrong ends.

maybe Orphan Black can inspire the science thats to come

With the end of Orphan Black imminent, were looking at the real world for our fix of real science straddling the world of science fiction. Since the show began airing in 2013, have we gotten any closer to the future of extreme body modifications and human cloning that Orphan Black has so often teased? I spoke with Paul Knoepfler, a biology professor at UC Davis, and John Quackenbush, professor of biostatistics and computational biology at Harvard and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, to see how far away we are from some of the shows most outrageous inventions.

GROWING A TAIL

Early in the shows run, Olivier, a body-modification fan whos one of the antagonists overseeing a human cloning project, shows off the pink tail hes grown. Sarah is understandably disgusted. But such body modifications could exist, as humans are already naturally born with primordial tails, Knoepfler says. All youd need to do is stop the pre-programmed cell death of those tail cells, maybe by giving a pregnant woman a drug, Knoepfler says. The most challenging part of getting a functional tail would be finding a way to extend the length of the spine, according to Quackenbush. And even if a tail was successfully constructed, there are more unknowns, says Knoepfler, like what part of the brain would control it, or whether the tail would trip you as youre walking. Granted, that isnt a problem if its this short:

I SPY WITH MY BIONIC EYE

At the end of season 2, Rachel Duncan, a clone whos grown up under the care of large corporations, is stabbed in the eye. She receives an artificial replacement, and after many months, she regains complete sight. Ultimately, though, she decides to tear out her eye, because she learns the man responsible for commissioning it also had a camera installed inside it to spy on her. This leads to a truly creepy cinematic moment where Rachel sneaks into the mans office, looks down at his mysterious tablet, and discovers a live stream of what her eye sees: a screen within a screen within a screen, ad infinitum. I watched you touch yourself in the shower where you think its clean, the man says gleefully in a following episode.

Putting the shows sinister ingenuity aside for a moment, Rachels bionic eye spy-cam and all may be possible, Knoepfler and Quackenbush say. Bionic eyes already exist, but the main challenge is connecting an artificial eye with the optic nerve, which connects the eye to the brain. That nerve probably would have been damaged during Rachels initial injury. Creating a bionic eye poses an additional challenge, as the eye must mimic nature and be able to send and receive the right kinds of signals to be read by the brain, says Quackenbush. But if the eye and optic nerve could be reconnected, the eye could potentially be powered by a battery, and making a camera small enough to fit inside the eye is completely possible with todays current technology. Then Wi-Fi and Bluetooth would give the eye live-streaming capabilities.

POISONOUS BOT IMPLANT

In the penultimate season, Sarah discovers she has a bot implanted inside her cheek, which acts as a tracking device and contains a poison her enemies can release into her bloodstream. Micro-tracking implantations already exist in our world: just take the microchips that are often implanted in dogs and cats, Quackenbush says. The tracking device part of the bot also seems plausible: there are devices today that can draw on nearby Bluetooth devices as a network, Quackenbush says. And even storing a toxin inside the bot isnt just science fiction, given the steady infusion of insulin or other drugs that devices already offer humans today. The problem, however, is the bots power supply: it would have to be significant enough to potentially sustain the bot throughout a human lifetime and no such batteries exist yet.

AND OF COURSE, CLONING

We already have clones; theyre identical twins, says Quackenbush. But there are other, less random methods for achieving human cloning. One way is how Dolly the sheep was cloned, by taking the part of the egg cell that contains genetic information and replacing it with a donors cell nucleus. The egg is then fertilized and grown into a clone. But using this method, called somatic cell nuclear transfer, on humans could be extremely unsafe, because the clone could have serious developmental disorders, Knoepfler says.

Quackenbush imagines another method to approach human cloning: reversing cell aging. Basically, adult stem cells could be reverted into their original state as stem cells, when they possessed the genetic potential to divide and become the heart, liver, skin, and other organs. An embryo, in many ways, is the ultimate stem cell, says Quackenbush. But this method hasnt been tried before.

No federal laws in the US ban human cloning

Orphan Blacks science consultant, Cosima Herter, believes that cloning humans is illegal in North America. Were not allowed to hear about it, because were not allowed to do it, she wrote in a blog post for the show in 2013. This isnt quite right no federal laws, at least in the US, ban human cloning. The US Food and Drug Administration is the regulator that matters for research into cloning humans.

With the end of Orphan Black comes the end of a decently plausible science fiction series. Its given us hints of what the future might have in store. It could even inspire the science to come. I think [science fiction] is part of what got us into this business in the first place, Quakenbush says of himself, and others in the science community, You see the future and you want to try to invent it.

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Orphan Black is ending, but how far has human cloning come? - The Verge